That Music List

Saturday, 7 February 2026

LIST 239 - 07/02/2026

Hello again,

Hope you're all keeping well and, if reading this from anywhere in the UK at the moment, somehow managing to stay dry.

This week's List starts with almost a minute of tape loading and screeching from a ZX Spectrum home computer of over four decades ago. Odd, perhaps, but hopefully not too taxing on your ears (you're welcome to suggest some of my actual musical choices are more disagreeable!), and the context is important.

Chris Sievey, ex-Freshie and soon to be Frank Sidebottom, had computer programming as well as musical chops, and applied both to create a video to 1983 single Camouflage which could be played on your Speccy at the same time as the record spun round.

Only trouble was, the computer file from which to upload the Camouflage video was on the b-side of the single itself, rather than a separate cassette; and the success rate of cutting computer files onto vinyl in the first place, let alone the end user loading them from said vinyl, was rather poor.

Starting around the same time, a smattering of software houses would sometimes pursue a more conventional means to broadly the same end, adding music to the flip side of some of their computer game releases on cassette. That was usually an unrelated song from an act new to or low down the Virgin Records roster in the case of Virgin Games releases (no bundling of a dodgy, generic platform game or Pengo clone with a new track from peak era Culture Club here); but Incentive's Confuzion and Melbourne House's Dodgy Geezers, to name but two, came with their own theme tunes on side B.

Comparatively impractical and doomed as it was, Chris's idea was nevertheless more inventive, more novel, somehow more him. And he got at least a bit of telly coverage from the whole endeavour. We don't get the likes of him too often anymore, which seems a shame.

What ought not get lost in all of this is that Camouflage is an absolutely belting track. Powerpop on a likely very modest budget, swelling and booming in all the right places under the stewardship of Martin Hannett and Chris Nagle (both spelled incorrectly in the video credits). The poor bugger was a far better songsmith than perhaps some people thought at the time, though the Being Frank documentary and exhibitions of Sievey's many artefacts (Frank Sidebottom or otherwise) are hopefully burnishing his reputation sufficiently, if belatedly.

(Major props at this juncture to YouTube poster soundhog09, who succeeded where others both at the time and since failed and managed to get a technically sound, clear recording of Camouflage aligned to the accompanying video. It reads as if it were quite the struggle).

Also dating from 1983, this week's Eurotastic choice comes from Righeira, probably best known in Britain for their track L'estate sta finendo, as repurposed by Liverpool FC fans into their Allez Allez Allez chant. That one isn't my favourite of theirs, however - this is, to the extent that it's found its way onto our holiday driving playlists and the kids sing along having learned snatches of it phonetically.

Produced, as with a number of their tracks, by another crack Italian disco duo La Bionda (of whom we'll hear more many weeks from now), No Tengo Dinero is one of plenty that Righeira sung in Spanish in preference to Italian for distinctiveness sake. It worked.

I dunno. Just three weeks into the relaunch of That Music List, and the two songs I'm writing about first are both 43 years old. Just as well I don't promote this as an exclusively new music feed.

There is more recent fare to digest also, however, including last year's farewell single from the splendid Shopping, whose joyous Indietracks set from 2019 will continue to live long in the memory. An amicable split as far as I can make out (and I'm not naturally of a mind to attempt to probe further to prove these sort of things either way), it's reassuring to remember the inventive, prolific Shopping frontperson R Aggs won't be lost to the business, their other projects such as Sacred Paws surviving still.

As far as I can tell the departure of Reuben Wu from Ladytron since their previous album in 2023 is a cordial one also, the band's co-founder simply finding music too much to juggle alongside a parallel career in art and photography that's now very much in the ascendency. I wish him well, all the more so upon learning recently he's a Sheffield Hallam alumnus (I really hope my wife's former longstanding place of work has celebrated that fact at some point since Ladytron's career took off).

What I've heard of the forthcoming eighth studio album Paradises augurs well for the prospects of the band remaining a vital, interesting going concern as a three-piece, not least Kingdom Undersea, its stately, serene beauty, piano-house era adornments and all.

You'll notice that Acid House Kings is badged as my song of the year for 2011, the second song of the year to appear in the revamped That Music List following on from Cardiacs' 2025 winner a fortnight ago. Just to reiterate: I originally heard Would You Say Stop? when it came out in 2011; I made it my favourite song of the year at the end of 2011; and no song from 2011 which I've heard since has displaced it from top spot in my reckoning. All of the songs I include as songs of the year have to meet all three criteria for the year in question, which will explain the gaps the further back in time we go.

Don't worry overly about all that, though. Just enjoy this singularly charming piece of indiepop from an act who would surely feature in an Only Connect group of four acts who sound nothing like the genre namechecked in their band name. Kings of actual Acid House they are clearly not. I suppose Eagles of Death Metal could count as another example - can you think of some more?

Other highlights this week include, but are by no means limited to:

some classic Jeff Mills techno as endorsed by Peely (Underground Resistance),
my nautically influenced lovely Sheffield friends (All Ashore!),
a far earlier era of Sheffield indie-pop from what would later move up the A1(M)/A64 and become St Christopher (Vena Cava),
one of the defining statements from the briefly ubiquitous but now largely overlooked Bootleg/Bastard Pop/Plunderphonics (delete as applicable) phenomenon of the early 2000s (Kurtis Rush),
something which even conspicuous support from Saturday Superstore and Timmy Mallett (to the extent of recording radio show jingles for the latter) couldn't quite turn into a breakthrough hit (This Island Earth),
a first introduction for many of you to the concept of Polkapunk (accordion through a guitar amp and the rest of it) from Austrian duo Attwenger,
a farewell to the recently passed Joseph Byrd (The United States of America), courtesy of a 1968 single which would be covered by Northern Picture Library a quarter of a century later (yes, yes, another Field Mice reference on the fly. I know...),
to conclude, the first appearance of the A Long Goodbye feature, this time around comprising almost ten minutes from Mush, a Leeds post-punk act some of you will have seen supporting Stereolab a few years back.

Something for everyone, I hope. And if not, there's always next week.

J xx

Click on the video to play each tune (links last checked as all working 06/02/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

CHRIS SIEVEY - Camouflage (1983)

SHOPPING - White Noise (2025)

BURNING SPEAR – African Jamaican (1997)

FAVOURITE SONG OF THE YEAR: 2011

ACID HOUSE KINGS - Would You Say Stop?

DANCE HALL AT PEEL ACRES

UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE - The Storm (1992)

St VINCENT - Broken Man (2024)

BRIAN ENO – Needles in the Camel’s Eye (1973)

ALL ASHORE! - Charlie’s Mast (2020)

THE BLUE AEROPLANES - …And Stones (1990)

LADYTRON - Kingdom Undersea (2025)

VENA CAVA – A Girlfriend Is… (1981)

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE

ZIPPER – Hoy Estoy Muy Pop (2007)

EUROTASTIC

RIGHEIRA - No Tengo Dinero (official maxi version) (1983)

GEOWULF - He’s 31 (2019)

KURTIS RUSH - Forgot About Sugababes (2001)

CREEPING JENNY - Living a Girl’s Adventure Tale (1998)

WAXAHATCHEE - Mud (2025)

CHROMEO - Needy Girl (2004)

SCIENTISTROCK

HARMONIA - Watussi (1974)

MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s

THIS ISLAND EARTH - See That Glow (1984)

OLAN MONK - 10 Days (2025)

CAB CALLOWAY - Everybody Eats When They Come to My House (1947)

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - X-Ray Eyes (2025)

ATTWENGER - Bian (1992)

CODY - Anticyclone (1998)

THE WHITE STRIPES – Offend in Every Way (2001)

IN LOVING MEMORY: Joseph Byrd

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - Love Song for the Dead Ché (1968)

THE LONG GOODBYE

MUSH - Alternative Facts (2017)

Saturday, 31 January 2026

LIST 238 - 31/01/2026

Hello again,

First of all, a big thankyou to everyone who has reached out since I reactivated That Music List earlier this month.

I'm very conscious that looking at a page of links isn't necessarily how everyone chooses to consume music these days, and that the adverts on YouTube in particular can rankle. If everyone's stuff was on Bandcamp, and Bandcamp could be nested in Blogger in the same way as YouTube is, I'd be all over it more.

I've already had one friend comment that I wasted no time in namedropping The Field Mice once again. Guilty as charged! He'll note that they're even more present this week, as Skywriting is the subject of the first edition of my A Loved Album feature.

This is an unashamedly personal choice, as this 1990 work is not just loved, but endures as my all-time favourite album ("long-player" seems barely appropriate, given it clocks in at a mere 34 minutes and bits).

If the prevailing narrative that Sarah Records was the preserve of jangly indiepop and nothing else had already been dealt a few blows (many by The Field Mice themselves) by the time Skywriting hit the shelves in June 1990, then this wildly diverse album killed them stone dead. Six tracks, each a different genre, but at least five of them still recognisably the work of the same band despite the eclecticism.

Triangle attempts sequencer-driven baggy, albeit with muted vocals and existential crisis lyrics replacing the cocksure swagger and hedonism of so many of the genre's then chief practitioners. Canada's introduction promises some sort of US soul pop, rather than the neat little paean to The Stars Of Heaven which follows.

Clearer is the nearest thing on the album to indiepop, albeit executed with more polish and confidence than the band had ever managed previously; had I first heard this song in 1990, rather than on belated purchase eighteen months later, it would have been a shoe-in for my Favourite Song of the Year feature, so highly do I rate it even now.

It Isn't Forever is Movement-era New Order, glacial synths, Morse Code, thrashy outro and all. Below The Stars offers a vision of an early 1990s world in which the then still nascent Spiritualised aren't already hoovering their way through the medicine cabinet. Only the staggering Humblebee doesn't immediately (if at all) identify itself as a Field Mice track, the Clock DVA homage containing no vocals from Bobby Wratten and an atypical guitar drone buried deep amid the multilayered sample barrage.

Many present-day reviews posit the idea that Skywriting was a deeply divisive release at the time, one which split opinion among those who'd followed the band unwaveringly to that point. Was it? It went further in pushing the variety envelope than predecessor Snowball, but that had still opened with another extended sequencer-driven meditation and signed off with a multiple guitar-layered thrash followed by a dark ballad reminiscent of Black.

From my point of view, the mix of styles was just the ticket, mirroring as it did listening habits to that point largely informed by the stylistic gear changes of certain radio programmes and various artist compilation albums. Indeed, as regards the latter, my first exposure to the track Triangle had been through the inclusion of an edited version of it on Beechwood's Indie Top 20 Volume 10 not long beforehand (NB In an exchange of letters around the time of Sarah Records' retirement in August 1995, one of Matt Haynes or Clare Wadd insisted I was the first person they knew of who'd discovered the label that way).

Whatever the truth of it, were Skywriting a new release in the present day, that genre-hopping likely wouldn't raise too many eyebrows (either in general, or in the specific context of Wratten's impressively broad body of work in the intervening years), and I doubt I'd love it any the less for that.

Astonishingly, considering I've included somewhere in the region of seventeen Field Mice tracks across That Music List's lifespan previously, none of Clearer, It Isn't Forever or Humblebee has ever featured before, and it is a pleasure to be able to include all three now.

It is, of course, not just all about a 36-year-old album from the depths of south London this week. 8th Deadly Sin gives us the chance to consider the tremendous third coming of Miki Berenyi, once of Lush, then of Lush again, and latterly of Piroshka and her own Trio. I sense a liberated air about Miki these days, the product of either or both of the greater autonomy she retains over her music career now and the release - in both senses of the word - of her searing memoirs (albeit one would perhaps like to see Emma Anderson exercise her right to reply on some clutch points).

It was a shame that last July's Pop At the Lock alldayer clashed with the Nev Clay gig I mentioned last week, as seeing Miki live for the first time would have been a genuine treat.

Then And Now this week heralds the unexpected and joyful return of Hydroplane after just shy of a quarter of a century. The echoey production, Kerrie Bolton's clear and heartstring-tugging vocals, the gentle percussive ticks and messrs Cummings and Withycombe's tasteful guitar insertions are still all present and correct, not just from the last time those named convened as Hydroplane but stretching back further to their more overtly indiepop-focussed days as The Cat's Miaow. One of my all-time favourite Australian bands back then, one of my all-time favourite Australian bands now.

Plenty more I could say on the remainder, but whilst (obviously) recommending every track I've shared this week, permit me to draw your attention also to the finest pop statement of a Yorkshire musical genius (Bill Nelson); a piece of German punk-pop that would have been a scene staple had an indiepop band recorded it (Die Ärzte; and yes, this is a hill I'm prepared to die on); as excellent a pop track as Nottingham's lovely Alexander Christopher Hale has ever crafted (August Actually); a pre-fame Ian Broudie (Care); and a tribute to the late Stephen Luscombe (including something quite extraordinary he played clarinet on in the 1970s).

J xx

Click on the video to play each tune (links last checked as all working 30/01/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

MING - La ballade de Johnny Guitar (2001)

DRY CLEANING - Cruise Ship Designer (2025)

THE FLAMING LIPS – The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (2006)

BILL NELSON – Do You Dream in Colour? (1980)

MIKI BERENYI TRIO - 8th Deadly Sin (2025)

A LOVED ALBUM: The Field Mice - Skywriting (1990)

THE FIELD MICE - Clearer

DOCH DER COUNTDOWN LÄUFT

DIE ÄRZTE - Westerland (1988)

ROBYN - Dopamine (2025)

AUGUST ACTUALLY – Carry Your Good Name (2015)

BRITISH ELECTRIC FOUNDATION – A Baby Called Billy (1981)

MANU CHAO – Viva Tu (2024)

KILLING JOKE – Sanity (1986)

A LOVED ALBUM: The Field Mice - Skywriting (1990)

THE FIELD MICE - It Isn't Forever

RAPPING SONGS

DEL THA FUNKEE HOMOSAPIEN - Mistadobalina (1991)

SNÕÕPER - Fitness (2023)

THE YUMMY FUR - Prole Birthday (1996)

CAVERN OF ANTI-MATTER – Adventures in One Octave (2013)

FABIENNE DELSOL – The Face (2019)

FIGURINE – New Mate (2000)

A LOVED ALBUM: The Field Mice - Skywriting (1990)

THE FIELD MICE - Humblebee

THEN AND NOW: Hydroplane

HYDROPLANE - Houdini’s Plane (2025)

HYDROPLANE - Wurlitzer Jukebox (1997)

LANDE HEKT - Favourite Pair of Shoes (2025)

ORBITAL – Belfast (1991)

HANN – Checkout Girl (2019)

DUBSTAR – Just a Girl She Said (1995)

FUTURE BIBLE HEROES – Keep Your Children in a Coma (2013)

MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s

CARE - Whatever Possessed You (1984)

IN LOVING MEMORY: Stephen Luscombe

RICHARD STRAUSS / PORTSMOUTH SINFONIA - Sonnenaufgang, from: Also sprach Zarathustra (1896/1974)

BLANCMANGE - Blind Vision (1983)

Saturday, 24 January 2026

LIST 237 - 24/01/2026

So here we are, then - the first List since May 2018, and a few changes to note.

Firstly, a longer running time, upped from just under the length of a CD to just under the length of a two-hour radio show. That's not an unsubtle dropping of a hint on my part, as my limitations as a broadcaster were long exposed some fifteen years ago. Rather, I just find two hours a nicer, rounder quantity of time to work with than an hour and twenty.

Secondly, more features. Unless they were a themed special (by year, Xmas, Eurovision, etc.), previous Lists would generally include Then and Now and In Loving Memory as a maximum, and nothing else. However, there are now well over twenty different features that'll be appearing. Not all at once, and some more than others, but a goodly handful each time, just to keep it interesting. Click here for a glossary of what they are and what they contain.

Thirdly and finally, embedded videos! I have no idea whether this feature was already present in Blogger the last time I uploaded a List; I'm guessing at yes, but the Victorian laptop I was using at the time would likely have screamed enough at anything other than the construction of the simplest, blandest of lists. I'm sure it must be handier to click on a video or link without having to be propelled out of the List in order to watch it, though I suspect you might still need to for links to Bandcamp material.

Right, then, what can I tell you about some of today's contents?

The List actually contains my three favourite songs of 2025, starting with number one. I'm sure I wasn't alone among Cardiacs fans in harbouring fears that I'd actually want to like the LSD album more than I ultimately actually would like it, chiefly out of goodwill towards all those responsible for this herculean task of crafting something from the raw materials the late Tim Smith left behind.

Shear - if one possibly can - the music of all of the back story that comes with it, however, and what's there is still an astonishing piece of psychedelic punk pop rock. Not the creative or songwriting equal of the Sing to God album for me, as almost nothing on Earth ever will be, but a better produced, richer sounding piece of work whose highpoints are very high indeed.

Lead single Woodeneye, originally played in fragment form by Tim Smith to at least one Cardiacs acolyte down the phone nearly two decades ago, went a long way towards assuaging fears that LSD would be Cardiacs lite. Simultaneously direct yet complex, simultaneously beautiful yet manic, it does exactly what you'd hope one of the poppier statements on a Cardiacs album might do.

There's an added poignancy for me to the whole Cardiacs story these days, following the recruitment of Mike Vennart to the recording and live ranks of the band. In his former day job as frontperson of Oceansize, Mike would have been among the regular listening pleasures of my much-loved sister-in-law Kate, who left us suddenly in 2023. I'd have loved to play her this.

Second place for me in 2025 was There's More to Life than Crooks by Lighting in a Twilight Hour, just the most recent reminder of Bobby Wratten's propensity for occasional piercing political statements hidden in the plain sight of beautiful indiepop music.

The Field Mice won't necessarily have been thought of by all as overtly political, beyond their association with a record label in Sarah Records which intrinsically was; yet that early Wratten vehicle occasionally gave us statement songs such as the pro-LGB This Love is Not Wrong and the ahead-of-the-curve dismantling of toxic masculinity Song 6. Cut to the staggering Dear Faraway Friend from his Northern Picture Library incarnation, apparent musical simulation of a war scenario, air raid, sirens and all. Cut to Trembling Blue Stars' A Statue to Wilde, a reflection on the progress made on gay rights and acceptance, and the progress still to make. And so it goes on.

More so than most of his previous projects, I've found some of Lightning in a Twilight Hour's output veering towards the pretty and admirable rather than the compelling. I don't mean those fascinating soundscape and noise experimentation pieces Bobby has long enjoyed crafting; they can be treated separately. Rather, some of the pieces intended as conventional pop or indiepop music just haven't quite landed, meandering rather than grabbing.

...Crooks does everything right, though. Six minutes of precise, calmly delivered barbs against the Trumps and Farages of this world and all they stand for, plus words of comfort and defiance, all set against gently pulsing electronic pop, thoughtful guitar additions and Anne Mari Barker Davies's unmistakable backing vocals. "Let your existence be the resistance" is a line originally attributed to Albert Camus, I understand. It's also a single line in the song that sums up the whole perfectly.

And third place? Stereolab. They can be an arid, detached proposition live, sometimes a little bit too enchanted with how far they can stretch an idea on stage whilst punters increasingly cough and kick their heels (the version of Lo Boob Oscillator they closed with when I saw them here in Sheffield in 2019 went from long to overlong to self-indulgent to purgatory in succession).

A few of their late-1990s/early-2000s albums could probably be accused of similar, but comeback longplayer Instant Holograms on Metal Film was pleasingly short on such excesses even within its hour-long run time, and lead single Aerial Troubles sparked with pure pop song vim and accessibility in a way that seemed almost entirely lost to them around that Sound Dust or Cobra and Phases... period. Tick, v.g.

I've banged on for way too long already, and rest assured some Lists won't have anything close to this much preamble. Quick notes about a few other inclusions, however;

Nev Clay's York gig in July last year, put on by Jo and Pete Dale from Knitting Circle, not only afforded me the chance to see this kindly, humble, hilarious and super gifted singer songwriter play for the first time this century (gigs much outside of Newcastle by him are few and far between), but lit the touchpaper in terms of wanting to go out and see live music more often again. To all of those concerned, I thank you most humbly.

Duck get a deserved play for services to my revived live music consumption also, Sarah and Chris from the band having taken on the running of Sheffield DIY venue Hatch, formerly the Audacious Art Experiment, in the time since I saw them perform Monsters (and much else besides) there some years prior. Long may it prosper.

The choosing of a Telex track which namechecks Brigitte Bardot for this List long predates her recent passing, and absolutely shouldn't be taken as any endorsement of her more hateful personal views whatsoever. It's definitely an endorsement of those ace deadpan Belgian electronic funsters and most memorable of Eurovision contestants, however.

Red Pony Clock were a highlight of the first Indietracks festival I was able to attend, back in 2008, Gabe and Gerry Saucedo skillfully squeezing their too-many-member psychedelic mariachi ensemble (their words) onto the long, very thin truck stage (the proper outdoor stage came a year later) for one of the entire weekend's most joyful performances.

J xx

====================

FAVOURITE SONG OF THE YEAR: 2025

CARDIACS - Woodeneye